In today's fast paced, high-technology business world, it is often desirable to be able to quickly obtain contact information for business associates encountered in the field whereby contact information is transferred between individuals. Traditionally, contact information such as name, business name, title, address and telephone number is printed on a smaller sized business card that is handed out to new contacts. However, the number of business cards that a person obtains may accumulate such that important business cards may be lost or misplaced. A paper based solution of this problem is to transcribe the information in a portable sized address book. A disadvantage of this solution, however, is the requirement that the information of each business card must be tediously transcribed by hand into the address book and which may result in transcription errors. With the advent of portable electronic computer devices that are battery powered, that are smaller sized and that provide ever greater information processing capabilities, the paper address book is being rapidly replaced by portable data assistant or portable digital assistance (PDA) devices that provide the functionality of the paper based address book while also providing other useful features (e.g., calendar, expense tracking, to do list, note pad, etc.). However, these powerful hand-held information handling systems still require the user to transcribe information received on a business card into the information handling system, a tedious and error prone task.
One solution to the transcription problem is to utilize an information reader or scanner to electronically obtain the information printed on a medium such as a standard business card. However, the moving scanning elements of traditional flatbed scanners are too large and too complex to be practical in a smaller sized, portable device. Scanning systems that are used in document feed type devices (e.g., fax machines) require some form of motorized, mechanical drive mechanism for feeding a document past a scanning element at a constant rate. However, a mechanical document feeding system is also to bulky and too impractical to implement in a hand-held portable device. Further, any mechanical system will require too much power to be practical in a smaller sized, battery powered device, and mechanical parts tend to wear out and are prone to failure. Additionally, motorized systems tend to consume too much power for a battery powered device. A linear scanning element could be contemplated in which the user feeds the document or information containing medium past the scanning element by hand. However, it is difficult for a human to provide a constant scanning rate so that skewing of the information due to a varying data input rate and other errors will inevitably occur. A two-dimensional type scanning element may be utilized to scan the entirety of the document at once, however two-dimensional scanning elements are too costly and require complex control software and focussing elements and are thus not a practical solution for fast, simple scanning of smaller sized documents such as business cards with a portable electronic address book device. Thus, there lies a need for a simple, electronic scanner for scanning information containing media and having no mechanical moving parts that is not prone to rate skewing and other problems associated with a manual feed scanner.